Return to Saussure

Introduction Artificial intelligence has rapidly become surrounded by a remarkably stable vocabulary. We are told that AI is inevitable, that algorithms know what we want, that data never lies, that machines will replace human workers, and that the future belongs to those who adapt. These expressions recur in newspaper headlines, corporate presentations, political speeches, and everyday conversation with such regularity that they have acquired the character of common sense. Public debate usually concerns whether they are true. Are algorithms genuinely objective? Can AI understand us? Will automation inevitably transform every profession? Roland Barthes approached questions of this kind differently. Rather than asking whether such statements were true or false, he asked why they appeared so self-evident in the first place. The shift may seem subtle, but it changes the object of inquiry. Instead of evaluating the factual accuracy of particular claims, Barthes directs our attention to...

To Chris Thesis The arrival of AI has not made writing obsolete. It has changed what education should value. If drafting becomes inexpensive, then the central academic skill is no longer producing a first draft but critically reading, questioning, revising, and improving one. In this sense, philosophers such as Derrida become suddenly timely, not because students must adopt their conclusions, but because they exemplify habits of reading that the age of AI demands. The Wrong Question Since the arrival of powerful AI systems, schools and universities have found themselves asking a familiar question: Should students be allowed to use artificial intelligence to write essays? Some teachers advocate banning these tools altogether, arguing that they encourage plagiarism, weaken critical thinking, or reproduce the assumptions found in the vast collections of human texts on which they were trained. These concerns are understandable, but they may also be asking the wrong question. Wh...

New Media. AI image Introduction When a new technology enters the artistic field, it rarely does so quietly. More often, it unsettles hierarchies, redistributes authority, and provokes fierce resistance from those whose status was secured under older conditions. The current controversies surrounding large language models and generative images belong to this long historical pattern. A dramatic precedent can be found in Charles Baudelaire’s 1859 text Le public moderne et la photographie , where the poet launches a vitriolic attack against the newly emerging medium of photography. Reading this essay today, one is struck not only by the violence of Baudelaire’s language, but also by the familiarity of its argumentative structure. This article argues that contemporary anxieties about artificial intelligence reproduce the same moral and aesthetic logic that informed Baudelaire’s denunciation of photography. Despite the apparent inversion of their complaints (mechanical realism in the nin...